America's secret drone war in Africa

Opening salvo
On 7 January 2007, a Predator took off from an American base in
Africa -- all evidence suggests it was Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.
Command of the aircraft was then transferred to a two-person crew,
most likely sitting in a trailer in Nevada. The
Predator cruised the roughly 500 miles to the southern Somali
town of Ras Kamboni. Following coordinates provided by Ethiopian
intelligence, the Predator used its high-fidelity video camera to
track a convoy of vehicles transporting Aden Hashi Farah, one of
Somalia's top Al Qaeda operatives. Farah had trained in Afghanistan
and returned to Somalia where he led the kidnapping and murder of
aid workers.

The Predator was unarmed, possibly to save weight for its
long-distance flight. So an AC-130 gunship fitted with cannons and
machine guns opened fire, smashing the
convoy. Farah was wounded but survived: he would be killed a year later
in another US air strike. While it failed to take out the
primary target, the Ras Kamboni raid was the opening shot in the
East African drone war. Subsequent robot-led attacks would be much
more successful for the Americans.

The drones came by land and by sea. Besides Camp Lemonnier,
Predators and Reapers operated by the Air Force (and possibly the
CIA) deployed to the
Seychelles and Ethiopia for flights over the Somalia. It's
been difficult to verify exactly how many drones are present at
each base, but Predators and Reapers normally deploy in groups of
three or four known as "orbits," each staffed by around 75 people
who launch, land, arm and repair the 'bots. If all three
major known African UAV bases have single
orbits, the robot force structure in the region could include as
many as 12 Predators and Reapers at a time.

At around the same time the larger drones were settling in,
American agents, commandos or contractors in Mogadishu -- it's not
clear who, exactly -- received an unknown number of five-pound,
hand-launched Ravens from manufacturer AeroVironment. The simple,
camera-equipped Ravens were ideal for short-range surveillance
flights during the urban battles aimed at liberating Mogadishu from
militants. In 2011 Washington approved a $45 million (£29 million)
package of arms and training to Ugandan peacekeepers in
the city that included another four Ravens.

Meanwhile Navy ships sailing off the Somali coast began carrying
catapult-launched Scan Eagles manufactured by Boeing and Insitu as
well as Northrop Grumman's
vertical-takeoff Fire Scout robo-copters. The Fire Scouts
initially helped in Navy counter-piracy efforts, but by 2011 had
shifted to "overland intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance …
for Special Operations Forces," according to a recent Navy
story. The sailing branch also deployed one of its five RQ-4
Global Hawks -- Northrop-built spy drones with the wingspan of a
737 airliner --to an unspecified Indian Ocean base to, among other
duties, provide air cover for the 5th
Fleet off the Somali coast. And although unmentioned in
press reports, Air Force Global Hawks are also theoretically
available for Somalia patrols from their forward base in the United
Arab Emirates.

The Ethiopians occupied Somalia for three bloody years then
retreated, leaving behind a mostly Ugandan peacekeeping force that
gradually fought its way out of its Mogadishu strongholds, finally
recapturing the city this year. In late 2011 the Kenyans invaded in Somalia's south.
American support steadily expanded in concert with the
Ugandan-Kenyan attacks. The pace of U.S. drone flights increased
commensurately.

"The number of reports concerning the use of Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles in Somalia in 2011-12 has increased," the UN Monitoring
Group on Somalia and Eritrea reported in late June. The group said
it tracked 64 unidentified military aircraft over Somalia,
including drones, in the 11 months between June 2011 and April this
year. There were surely many more flights the UN observers did not
see.

How many? It's possible to make an educated guess.

In 2009 Air Force general John Corley, then chief of Air Combat
Command, said that 95 percent of his branch's UAV
sorties were focused on "Southwest Asia," which to the
Pentagon means Iraq and Afghanistan. Let's say just half of the
remaining five percent of flights occurred in the
Pentagon's other major drone battleground, Somalia.
Since 2007 the Air Force's Predators and Reapers, today numbering
around 300, have flown nearly a million flight
hours. By our reckoning, the percentage that may have occurred
over East Africa -- some 25,000 hours over five years -- equates to
around 12 hours of robot flight time per day. And that's assuming
the proportion of drone flights devoted to Somalia hasn't increased
lately, which in fact it most certainly has.

Conservatively speaking, it's possible at least one Predator or
Reaper drone has been airborne over Somalia half the day, every day
since the first Predator took off from Camp Lemonnier in 2007.
Flights by Global Hawks, Fire Scouts, Scan Eagles and Ravens adds
to this persistent robot presence.

For the first four years the aerial robots played a strictly
supporting role, surveilling and tracking targets for Special
Operations Forces, gunship attacks, F-15 bombing runs, helicopter
raids and cruise-missile strikes. When the Predators and Reapers
began using their own weapons is unclear. The
first verifiable drone attack occurred on June
23, 2011, after which the robotic strikes occurred in rapid-fire
fashion. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism counted as many as
nine confirmed drone attacks between June 2011 and today.

Again, the actual number of strikes is
undoubtedly higher. If a robotic strike occurs out of sight of
reporters or their sources, it remains secret.

Telltale signs
The military rarely confirms drone operations over Somalia -- and
the CIA never does. This reporter actually
witnessed what appeared to be a Predator takeoff from Camp
Lemonnier in 2009 while waiting to board the destroyer
USS Donald Cook to cover a counter-piracy
mission. The robot launch was just part of the flurry of warplane
activity I observed over the bustling base. Leaving aside from that
fleeting firsthand sighting, the best evidence of America's African
drone war is left by the pilotless warplanes themselves … when they
crash, or nearly crash. The sheer number of flying robots tumbling
out of the sky over Somalia seems to indicate much more intensive
UAV operations than official and press reports imply.

Some of the first evidence of any US drone
activity in Somalia came in March 2008, when what appeared to be a
ship-launched UAV tumbled into the sea near Merka, then a
hotly-contested town in militant-dominated southern Somalia. "It's small and can be carried
by three people," local government official Mohamed Mohamoud
Helmi said of the winged object his constituents dragged from the
water. The description roughly matches the 40-pound Scan Eagle that
the Navy uses to shoot video just over the horizon from its
ships.

After the apparent Scan Eagle incident, drones began falling
from the heavens like zapped insects. On 13 May 2009, a Predator
was destroyed following an incident at what Air Force investigators
described as a "forward operating location."
It probably wasn't Iraq or Afghanistan, as those countries are
usually named in crash reports. Nor was the location likely to be
Pakistan, as drones there are generally understood to be the CIA's
responsibility. By process of elimination, it seems the 2009 crash
was in East Africa.